I came to a new appreciation of the hevra kadisha after the death of my son JJ in September 2002. My previous experiences were indirect: when my parents-in-law and then my father died, one phone call was made to their synagogues, and everything was set in motion.
But JJ did not die in his home community. He died suddenly in Israel, at age 36, when a van struck him on his bike. JJ was bicycling from Ra’anana with his brother David and a friend to visit their sister Goody in Zikhron Yaakov. He had arrived in Israel the previous night, and the rest of us were to join him a few days later for Sukkot.
The accident occurred early Friday morning. We, the parents, were in New York. By the time we understood the gravity of the situation, it was too late to travel. Moreover, no flights were scheduled for Saturday night, as Sunday was Yom Kippur eve and the airport closed early, a precaution taken after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Friends offered the use of their private jet, but postponed the flight upon learning the airport might be closed. As we could not travel until after Yom Kippur, the funeral was held over until Tuesday. This delay was highly unusual for a Jerusalem hevra kadisha with its tradition of burying even late at night so as not to delay interment. But the hevra understood we could not travel because of Shabbat and Yom Kippur and exerted no pressure. It may have helped that Rabbi Seth Farber, who arranged matters with the Jerusalem hevra, was a close friend of JJ’s and our family.
A hevra kadisha is responsible for doing everything, not only the tahara but also the shmira with its component of prayer and learning. Though JJ was out of reach of his home community, his brother and sister each had strong communal ties in Israel, and he himself had many friends all over the country. These friends and cousins constituted themselves as the initial hevra kadisha. They undertook the shmira, rotating watches for four days, studying mishnayot and reciting Tehillim. They never left his side. On the last day, the hevra kadisha of Jerusalem took over and performed the tahara. By the time we arrived, everything was in place.
We went directly to the cemetery. We were led by the hevra rabbi through the crowd to a private room where JJ’s body lay, giving us an opportunity to say a few parting words. Our family was standing all together. We did not have a lot of time before the funeral, for by the time we arrived, more than a thousand people had assembled and were waiting. JJ would have been concerned about keeping people standing in the hot sun. He was often late and kept others waiting, but never in a place of physical discomfort to them. He was highly sensitive to the comfort of others. With all these people waiting, I could almost hear him say, “We have to get started; people are hot and standing,” just as when I wasn’t quite ready with Shabbat lunch, he would quietly remind me that our guests were hungry.
A personal thought about the tahara: Although I have always been impressed with the work of our local hevra kadisha, I was never fully at ease with the idea of washing the body before burial. Part of me would ask, Why bother? The body will decay in a few days, maybe a few days longer in a plain pine box. Why pull people out late at night and early morning to do work that hardly makes a difference?
Moreover, privacy was an issue. I know this concern is odd—because what does it matter when you are dead whether or not you maintain your privacy; still, I did not like the idea that either people I barely knew, or people I knew well, would view my body.
All that changed when JJ died. Though he had been cleaned up in the hospital after the accident, and then again after his organ donation surgery, and though his body was missing kidneys; lung, liver, pancreas; skin (for Israel’s burn units) and bone (for cancer treatments)—the fact that his body was treated as a whole and purified after its ordeal somehow mattered to me. It was comforting that there was no distinction between his altered body and the body of one who had died a normal death. That his whole body, his whole self so to speak, was treated with dignity helped me put organ donation into the right perspective. For although I wrote that he donated his organs, it was we who made that decision. We based it on his values and his wishes, but I am sure he never imagined that he would be donating his organs so early in life. The fact that his body was purified before burial was one more connection to his real life, his corporeal whole life. By the time we got to the cemetery, he had been washed and wrapped and somehow looked tall and whole and, in an odd sense, quite regal—not a shell with missing parts or a frame mangled from an accident.
The rabbi of the hevra kadisha lifted the wrappings for us to identify him. We saw only a corner of his face, and after four days the signs of death were there. I understood why a hevra does its work as soon as the call comes in to allow for burial as quickly as possible. We often forget that a hevra kadisha must keep the same hours as an ambulance driver or emergency room doctor. There is little room for delay in the tahara, which means members must always drop their ordinary schedules and rise to the call.
Why do hevra members take pride and feel a sense of privilege in their work? Why do we never hear a grumble? Why do they feel a holiness about the act of washing a dead body? In JJ’s burial, their actions seemed to constitute a loving link between life and death. It was as if the entire interval between his accident and the hospitals and organ removal was overridden in the act of tahara. Somehow, this was the most appropriate ritual for the ending of JJ’s life. JJ always loved water and especially showers. His showers were legendary. He was an environmentalist and a conservationist, long before these words entered the national consciousness. He used every piece of office paper on both sides; paper plates and napkins could potentially be used again; he conserved water in many ways. But he allowed himself long, hot showers. The tahara was, in a sense, the last washing of his life before being placed in the ground. It was a loving act that would have been far more difficult, even lacerating, for someone grieving, someone so close. But the hevra kadisha members, following a set of compassionate rules, could give this gift of cleansing and purification to JJ as he exited earthly life, which is sacred, and entered the realm of death which involves mysteries we cannot begin to fathom. I believe that hevra members intuitively understand that their work, with its measure of kedusha (holiness), bridges these two realms.
I have always appreciated how brilliantly the rabbis understood human needs at a time of death of a loved one: the hevra kadisha is but one piece in the spectrum of laws of grief and mourning. Yet we must ask: are there new tasks for this ancient institution? I believe so as I consider JJ’s life and death.
JJ had a great, good heart. Donating his organs was a way of extending his essential generosity and kindness beyond his life. We knew without doubt that this would have been his choice. Today, everyone recognizes that organ donation saves lives and that halakha has been interpreted to permit it, even within Judaism’s strong parameters of honoring the dead. Yet, while the Orthodox community accepts organs at the same rate as others, it has a lower donation rate than any other community. Where does the hevra kadisha come in? In many instances, hevra members are friends of the dying person or his or her family. Making a decision about organ donation is a weighty one, and often a family is helped by thinking the matter through in conversation with others. Where possible, a hevra should connect to hospital transplant teams and medical ethicists to become a knowledgeable resource on organ donation; hevra members should also study the sources in Jewish law so as to be able to reinforce the new halakhic teachings concerning this act of kindness.
A second new task for the hevra kadisha is to update its views on women and their place in grief and mourning rituals. I felt total sensitivity and compassion from the Jerusalem hevra in JJ’s burial. Yet, one incident gave me pause, perhaps because of my prior experience with traditional hevra kadisha attitudes and practices. For example, women are often told that they may not eulogize and may not shovel the earth at the cemetery, and pregnant women are discouraged from attending funerals or going to the cemetery altogether. Moreover, an incident that took place a few years earlier involving the same hevra kadisha and the same Jerusalem cemetery had lingered in my memory. When my aunt died, the hevra signaled to my cousin Linda not to accompany her three brothers to the gravesite. Linda had been the caregiver for her mother during the last few months of her life and had traveled 9,000 miles to bury her, only to be halted at a point without sight lines to the grave. A few female cousins disregarded the hevra’s instruction and walked on without being stopped, but Linda did not want “to make a fuss” and had waited there.
So, for an instant, it crossed my mind even in the midst of my sorrow that it was because I was a woman that the rabbi held up a cautionary hand and said, “We don’t do that,” as we stood together in that little room before the burial. When I first saw JJ, I touched the top of his shoulder, wanting to have some physical contact with this child whom I was not able to hold in the hospital before his life slipped away. The rabbi quickly jumped in and said, “We don’t do that after tahara.” I stepped back, but could not help but wonder at the moment whether he cautioned me because I was a woman. Then he left us alone in the room, which I appreciated as a measure of sensitivity. Was he actually saying, “Be guided by your own emotions?” Not knowing whether it was a general halakha applicable to everyone, a specific law or ultra-Orthodox custom applying only to females, or simply his personal view, I would not violate his admonition. Moreover, another part of me said that perhaps this restraint was fitting. Although I desperately wanted to give JJ one last hug and still long for that moment, I know that it would have been hard for every family member to witness each other do so. Still, it should never have entered my mind that possibly the rabbi was suggesting that a woman’s touch would render this pure soul impure. Much later, I couldn’t help but wonder: would the hevra rabbi have similarly checked my husband had he reached out to touch his son? (I’ve since learned that even after tahara, a body is still tamei [a status of ritual impurity], and touching it does nothing to affect this status).
These last comments should in no way obscure the central truths about the hevra kadisha’s role and my personal gratitude for this last act of love for my child. The work of the hevra kadisha is considered the ultimate exemplar of hesed or lovingkindness; it is hesed shel emet, an act that is utterly selfless because the recipient, the dead, can never repay it.
Yet, there may be a deeper meaning to the phrase “hesed shel emet,” a lovingkindness that is strong enough to overcome emet, the stark truth. The Song of Songs teaches us, “vcvt ,unf vzg”“Love is as strong as death” (8:6). Indeed it is stronger than death because it persists after death. The hesed of the hevra is so strong that it takes the truth—that death is so fierce, so cruel, so final that it rips away the life and the vitality of the living person—and overcomes this truth, covering the harsh reality of death with a mantle of purity, respect, and dignity. Neither the loving family nor the buried dead can ever repay this hesed.